All hail the czarina

I always wondered why people whose job descriptions entailed overseeing somewhat impossible projects came to be called "czars" (or "tsars"). Johnson, the language blog at The Economist, considers the issue, and proposes an alternative.

Over at The New York Times, science writer Natalie Angier offers these thoughts on why not ma'am.

Another reason that we need Katha Pollitt

Just read Katha Pollitt's column, "Veil of Fears," in the June 14th issue of The Nation. About the ongoing controversy in Europe, in particular France and now Belgium, surrounding the proposed banning of face-veiling. In which she both writes against the ban and also admits:

I don't like face-veiling either. It negates the individual; it reduces women to sex objects who must be shrouded to avoid tempting men; it sends the message that men's "honor" resides in the bodies of "their" women. In a conflict between women and fundamentalists, including the fundamentalists in their own families, I would want to side with women, on dress as in other issues of personal freedom. Yet while the French Parliamentary Report on the Wearing of the Full Veil nodded frequently to "French values" and gender equality, it isn't obvious how criminalizing Muslim women's clothing makes them more equal - unless you believe that they are being forced to cover by male relatives or increasingly fundamentalist communities.

This takes seriously the idea that veiling allows conservative Muslim women both to follow the custom of (gendered) seclusion and enable them to work, learn, and even play in public. It unpacks what structures the apparent need for veiling. Which by the way is practiced in Judaism and Christianity.

It also points to the fact that at least some women are choosing to wear the veil. The Nation and The Economist, which also published a report in its May 15th issue, both note the relatively small numbers of women who cover their faces (much less wear the full-body burqa) in France and in Belgium. The Economist notes they include converts to Islam and in France, women from North Africa "where there is no face-covering tradition." They also are young.

So, what is going on? The motivations of Nicolas Sarkozy and other political leader seem clear, but what is less clear is why face-veiling, though in still relatively small numbers, is being adopted as, basically, a new tradition. I think that this is a significant point to bear in mind because there is a way in which face-veiling is depicted in American (and European) media as an ethnic and primeval custom of Islam, conflated with equally essentialist notions about jihad and terrorism and the Clash of Civilizations and so on.

When instead we might look a lot closer to home to find the conditions that make face-veiling seem appealing, attractive, even necessary to choose. Pollitt closes her column with a reference to a study at Stanford and the Sorbonne that suggests not "ethnic" (e.g., anti-Arab), but religious (e.g., anti-Muslim) discrimination in France: Identical resumes were created for three fictional women, whose names suggested an ethnic French, a Senegalese Christian, and a Senegalese Muslim woman. "Aurelie did only a little better than Marie, but she got three times the callbacks of Khadija."

I think most of my college students might suggest that Khadija should change her name to Aurelie or Marie. The imperative to assimilate is strong in the United States. Yet, I suggest that there are reasons also not to assimilate. For example, why bother? I might be an Aurelie on paper, but in person, I look like a Khadija.

More importantly, is face veiling a "religious" question alone? Esp. when religion is clearly also political and social and economic. It seems worth asking why these women (and men, for that matter, b/c they are implicated in the move toward veiling, whether they force their wives and daughters and sisters or not), and why now?

In the context of post 9/11 fear of and discrimination against an American / European construction of "Islam," face veiling might seem not to make a lot of sense, for example, to my college students. As a matter of fact, I have to think that Muslim women who choose to veil are not motivated by what our so-called terrorism experts today term jihadist sentiment.

Rather, I think it is worth the attempt to understand what are the concerns in the communities where face veiling is emerging? Keeping in mind that discrimination, whether ethnic or religious, had been experienced long before 9/11. It might be that for young Muslim women, veiling represents opportunities, not the curtailment of them. Including the status, financial security, emotional stability, protection that frankly, traditionalist (or so-called traditional) marriage could allow.

What is face veiling in France or Belgium (or the United States) really about?

I wish more people with a public forum would ask this question instead of feeding of false answers. At least we have Katha Pollitt.

The uses of ill literacy

Circulated on an e-mail in my department: This link to CNN's story about Arizona's new state law banning ethnic studies (i.e., Mexican-American studies) in the public schools.

The new law forbids elementary or secondary schools to teach classes that are "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" and advocate "the overthrow of the United States government" or "resentment toward a race or class of people."

The bill was pushed by state school Superintendent Tom Horne, who has spent two years trying to get Tucson schools to drop a Mexican-American studies program he said teaches Latino students they are an oppressed minority.

Leaving aside the retorts that one could made - about, for example, the fact that Latino students in Arizona do not need to be taught in the schools that they are members of an "oppressed minority" when all they need to do is look at the good citizens who enabled the passage of what amounts to legalized racial profiling - as an anthropologist and parent, my attention is drawn to the intense legislation surrounding the teaching and learning about race, culture, and ethnicity of children in elementary and secondary schools.

Recognizing schools as a critical element in the reproduction of culture and society, it is not surprising that the follow-up to Arizona's immigration law strikes now at what ought or ought not to be learned and taught there.

Here is another report on the happenings in Arizona, from The Economist this week, emphasizing the intersections between immigration, ethnic identity, and age:

William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC, think-tank, believes that Arizona may be a bellwether for the whole country in more ways than one. Over the past two decades Arizona’s Latino population of children and young adults has grown so fast that the state now has what he calls the largest “cultural generation gap” in the country: 83% of Arizona’s older people are white, but only 43% of its children now are. States like Nevada, California, Texas, New Mexico and Florida have gaps almost as large.

As a result, says Mr Frey, old white voters increasingly balk at paying taxes so that people they consider alien can go to school or the emergency room. The result, he thinks, is populist anger rather akin to that now fuelling the tea-party movement, which draws much of its support from white male baby-boomers. It is possible, says Mr Frey, that in Arizona the seeds of new racial and ethnic competition for public resources have been planted.

I think this points to a larger concern today, which is seeing children as somebody else's responsibility - and I think this is not just about old white versus young Latino people in Arizona.

"Don't trust anybody over 30" has become "Don't trust anybody under 30." In a college town, like where I live, the students themselves become the subjects of complaint, not the ramshackle conditions of the houses that they rent from landlords who charge a lot and do a little in terms of maintaining the properties. Teenagers are viewed with suspicion. Small children, like mine, regarded as annoyances.

Parents themselves become judged for helicoptering, neglecting, and / or spoiling their children. Or just having children at all.

This is what it looks like to disown the future.

Notably quotable

I am breaking my post-break silence with this observation from The Economist (March 20):

The doubters tend to focus on specific bits of empirical evidence, not on the whole picture. This is worthwhile - facts do need to be well grounded - but it can make the doubts seem more fundamental than they are. People often assume that data are simple, graspable and trustworthy, whereas theory is complex, recondite and slippery, and so give the former priority. In the case of climate change, as in much of science, the reverse is as at least fair a picture. Data are vexatious; theory is quite straightforward.

Although this comment describes the controversy surrounding climate change today, I think it applies to so much more - including human biological evolution and "intelligent design," not to mention the persistence of the fallacy of biological "race." The theory of evolution is elegant and the data tedious. Why is there an assumption that it should be otherwise?